Jolly Camper

Sophie-G leaves for Ecuador tomorrow.  Twenty five days on a World Challenge expedition.  We have been buying strange outdoor camping equipment for the last few months; inflatable this and that, cute fold-away cutlery, a silk (no less) sleeping bag liner.  As I speak a mosquito net is soaking in some foul smelling liquid in the sink.  She has stomped for hours around the house and garden in her new hiking boots and reads by the light of her head torch in bed - a perfectly normal, shallow, self-absorbed teenager, Sophie is not beyond laughing at herself. 

Mr. J. is off go-carting in France so it is up to me to help her pack – oh and by the way it is not just a rucksack anymore, in case you were wondering, it is all about litre size.  Packing for an expedition is a domaine in which I am utterly useless, a complete girl.  My friend the late Graham Harris once said,

“To my wife the great outdoors was that bit between the house and the car.”

I’m not that bad, I do like nature but I have never seen the attraction of eschewing a nice comfortable mattress and duvet for a night under the stars.  Aged eleven I went with the school on a look-see to Cuffley Camp.  I stared in horror at the latrines hanging over the cesspit already turning into the petit-bourgeois snob that I am today.  My almost-camping experience was ended when my cousin Christine got off the bus after a week of Cuffley hell and promptly burst into tears.  Aunty Joan and Mum spent a great deal of time on the phone discussing the incriminating evidence – a wet pillow case.  And thus I spent a week protected from the rain in a lovely youth hostel in Saffron Walden instead.

As a child our holidays were spent in caravans in Cornwall and Devon, above ground, albeit  hovering at half a metre, but with all the comforts of home.  We would set out in my Dad’s lime green Anglia, the car packed to the gunnels and mum sitting up front with a cooked chicken for sustenance.  (It’s a long haul to Cornwall from Hertfordshire in an Anglia).

I am watching (I have been demoted to watcher) Sophie pack her blah blah litres backpack still shocked that I have a daughter who finds the idea of 25 days in Ecuador attractive.  I feel a little like Edwina in Abfab always trying to get her daughter to stop studying and behave like a naughty teenager.

“No sundress?  Flip flops?”  I ask standing in the threshold of her room momentarily confusing Ecuador with Torremolinos.

She looks askance.

“You might want to take your boots off at the end of the day and those erm, hiking trousers and put on a pair of shorts and some flip flops.”

“We’re in the jungle Mum!”  She says getting up and closing the door.

“Good night”, I say sheepishly plodding back to my room feeling not only totally inadequate but a little worried as I never thought we would get this far, to the point where she was actually leaving for a place called Quito.  I thought she would go off the idea, see some pictures of world challengers having to wash in a river covered in nasty bites, murky shadows in the undergrowth and that would be the end of that.

I go to sleep thinking that maybe a wet pillow case would have been the making of me after all.